The Southeastern Conference has gotten everyone’s attention this year on the hardwood. That includes ESPN’s Jay Bilas. With the sport heating up ahead of its biggest month, the SEC is perhaps the most competitive league in the country. There’s a strong number of quality teams from the conference, which is a huge shift from how things were even a decade ago.
While football appears to be waning a bit, basketball has never been better.
Bilas has taken note of this, and remarked that he believes that it’s the best basketball league in America.
He joined The Paul Finebaum Show and boasted a claim that the SEC is not only the best league this year, but they’re the ‘most powerful’ league ever.
“This is the most powerful basketball league, top to bottom, that there has ever been,” he said via 247Sports. “When you take into account the modern landscape, it is truly incredible.”
Bilas argued that commissioner Greg Sankey deserves a lot of credit for the turnover the conference has made in the sport in the last decade. That combined with pushes from the athletic programs, quality hires across the board, and a flush of talent has resulted in an ultra-competitive basketball league.
Some college basketball enthusiasts may find this exaggerating though. The Big East was as strong a league as we’ve ever seen, and the Big Ten in recent years has enjoyed plenty of promise too.
And fair or not, the SEC will be critically judged on how they perform in the upcoming NCAA Tournament next month. If they have a bad showing, all of this talk will be for naught.
About Chris Novak
Chris Novak has been talking and writing about sports ever since he can remember. Previously, Novak wrote for and managed sites in the SB Nation network for nearly a decade from 2013-2022